Last year, Rama Burshtein set the Israeli film scene ablaze, receiving 13 Ophir nominations ("the Israeli Oscar") from the Israel Film Academy for her very first full-length feature Lemale et Ha'Halal (Fill The Void). When Ophir Awards were presented in Haifa on Sept. 21, Fill the Void received seven including Best Film, Best Director (Rama Burshtein), Best Screenplay (Rama Burshtein), Best Actress (Hadas Yaron) and Best Supporting Actress (Irit Sheleg). And as the winner of the Ophir Award for Best Picture, Fill the Void automatically became Israel's candidate for the 2013 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

As someone with an international reputation as an advocate for women filmmakers, you would think I'd be jumping for joy. After all, this was only the second time in 31 years that a woman had received an Ophir Award in the Best Director category, and only the fifth time in 45 years that a film directed by a woman was Israel's candidate for the BFLF Oscar. So why am I having such a difficult time writing this review?

Fill the Void is the story of "Shira" (Hadas Yaron), the 18-year-old daughter of a prominent Haredi family based in Tel Aviv. In the opening moments of Fill the Void, Shira is with her mother "Rivka" (Irit Sheleg) at the supermarket, and it looks like a Jewel or a Dominick's or any one of the myriad grocery stores you might find in any modern metro. Who are they speaking with on their cell phone? Maybe they are consulting with a friend about what ingredients are needed for a special recipe?

The person on the other end is actually a matchmaker, and what they are shopping for is a prospective groom. Rivka and Shira sneak over to the aisle specified by the matchmaker and see a young man who does not see them. Nevertheless, one look is enough; without ever speaking with this young man, Shira agrees to marry him.

But "Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht." ("Man plans and God laughs.")

In the midst of Shira's happy report about her trip to the supermarket, her pregnant older sister "Esther" (Renana Raz) excuses herself, walks into the restroom, and never emerges. Shira's marriage plans are put on hold as a grieving family copes with the death of a beloved daughter and the birth of a motherless grandson.

If we are just watching what is on screen without paying too much attention to the dialogue, everything will look totally familiar to us. Like women everywhere, Esther, Rivka, and Shira spend much of their screen time in kitchens, grocery stores and other domestic spaces. It is only when their men enter the frame, wearing full beards, twisted payot, long dark coats and fur shtreimels, that we feel the impact of religious orthodoxy on daily life.

Holding our hearts in her hands after Esther's tragic death, Burshtein wants us to believe that Shira always had and always will have full freedom to choose her own fate; that Haredi women are not "second class citizens" in any way. Shira and Shira alone can say yes to one prospective husband and no to another, and therefore, by implication, the rest of us--whether we are Conservative, Reconstructionist, Reform, or totally secular--have nothing to fear.

I have no quarrel with Burshtein-the-Director. She has, in fact, made a gorgeous film that is filled with well-defined and deeply-cherished anthropological detail. She has elicited lovely performances from all her cast members, particularly Yaron (who had very little film acting experience prior to being cast as Hadas).

It is clear that Burshtein worked very closely with her cinematographer (Asaf Sudry) and her costume designer (Hani Gurewitz) to create glowing images of Haredi life. And they were both rewarded for their efforts, Sudry with the Ophir Award for Best Cinematography, and Gurewitz with an Ophir nomination for Best Costume Design.

But I am not so enamored with Burshtein-the-Screenwriter. To my eyes, she has "gone Hollywood," creating a Haredi version of Jane Eyre that deliberately romanticizes the story of a young woman falling prey to an older man who is still in thrall to his first wife.

I am sure Burshtein would be genuinely shocked to hear me say this, but I also think Fill The Void is propaganda. I felt this the first time I saw Fill The Void last September at the New York Film Festival. I felt this again when I saw Fill The Void a second time last February at an IFP screening. (Fill The Void was on the IFP screening list because it had received two Independent Spirit Award nominations: Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay.)

Then I read the Director's Notes Burshtein wrote for the press kit created by Sony Pictures Classics (Fill The Void's American distributor). "MOTIVIATION: I set out on this journey out of a deep sense of pain. I felt that the ultra-Orthodox community has no voice in the cultural dialogue... What I am good at is telling a story. I'm good at telling about those things I'm passionate about, and what can I do? They are all tied to the ultra-Orthodox world of observance."

When Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre way back in the middle of the 19^th Century, she gave her novel a triumphant but hard-earned ending. Bronte equalized Jane's relationship with Mr. Rochester by providing her with a large inheritance from her uncle (John Eyre) and a marriage proposal from an impressive suitor (St. John Rivers). And oh yes, she blinded Mr. Rochester in the fire that destroyed his mansion (Thornfield Hall). In other words, Bronte gave her heroine genuine options. So if Jane still chooses to marry Mr. Rochester anyway, purging her mind of the now-dead madwoman in the attic, that is her choice. But I challenge you to watch Fill The Void and walk out believing Shira's "choice" is even half as free.

Fill The Void opens Friday June 14 at the Music Box Theatre on Southport. For schedule information, visit: http://www.musicboxtheatre.com/

Top Photo: Shira (Hadas Yaron) with Esther's husband Yochay (Yiftach Klein).

Bottom Photo: Women at the synagogue sitting behind the mechitza. From left: Shira's mother Rivka (Irit Sheleg), Shira (Hadas Yaron), Esther's Best Friend Frieda (Hila Feldman), and Shira's aunt Hanna (Razia Israeli).

Photo Credits: Karin Bar/ Sony Pictures Classics

In the opening moments of the new Czech film In the Shadow, a police captain named "Hakl" (Ivan Trojan) arrives at the Jewish Community Center in Prague, demanding to see a man named "Kirsch" (Miroslav Krobot). "You know he has a problem with alcohol?" Hakl knows. "You know he spent two years in Auschwitz?" Hakl knows.

When Hakl interrogates Kirsch about a robbery that happened the night before, Kirsch tells Hakl that he was drunk and spent the whole night in police custody "in the tank," a fact Hakl is quickly able to confirm. So when Kirsch is arrested anyway, Hakl begins to suspect things that he doesn't quite know yet, at least not for sure.

Then Hakl is ordered to arrest leaders of the Prague Jewish Community. "For what?" he protests, "for employing a drunk?" But policemen force their way into the Jewish Community Center anyway, interrupting children dancing to Klezmer music, and forcing men wearing kippot into ominous looking vans. 

Ivan Trojan as “Captain Hakl.” Lucky Man Films/Bleiberg Entertainment.

The next day the headlines blare: "Jews Caught Stealing Gold!" And so it begins: a purge of Prague's tiny Jewish community barely eight years after the end of the Holocaust.

The year is 1953, and although director David Ondříček and his co-writer Marek Epstein never specify any names beyond Kirsch's, what happens next echoes what really did happen in Prague in November 1952 when Rudolf Slánský and thirteen co-defendants were convicted of high treason in one of the most notorious "show trials" in the history of Czechoslovakia. The episode, now known as " The Slánský Trial," ended with the execution of most of the defendants (including Slánský). Eleven of the defendants (including Slánský) were Jewish. 

Warned multiple times to keep his distance, Hakl chooses to continue his investigation. When a mysterious German named "Zenke" (Sebastian Koch) appears "from Moscow," Hakl is told that Zenke has been "on the case for three years." What case? Hakl confronts him: "Five Jews or five million. It makes no difference to you."Since Hakl knows that Kirsch did not commit the robbery, he cannot rest until he learns who did. Even when his inquiries endanger his family, he cannot stop. And as Hakl gets closer and closer to the truth, his world unravels. 

Sebastian Koch as "Zenke."Lucky Man Films/Bleiberg Entertainment.

On one level In the Shadow is a brilliant "film noir," a detective story/police procedural about a man so driven by questions that he risks everything to get answers. Ondříček and Epstein use the whole Hollywood toolkit: men in suits and fedoras travel down dark wet streets while the notes on the soundtrack become increasingly dissonant. But there is no  MacGuffin  in this story, no Maltese Falcon to be found and fought over. Rather In the Shadow is another one of the great films now being produced in Eastern Europe (films like The Lives of Others), in which artists confront the pervasive evil of life under Soviet domination.

Furthermore, In the Shadow falls into that subcategory of films (like Little Rose and My Australia) which explore the intense anti-Semitism of the immediate post-Holocaust period. So much for: "Why didn't all the survivors just 'go home' and leave 'Palestine' to the Palestinians?" 

In the Shadow received eleven Czech Lion nominations in 2013 (awarded by the Czech Film and Television Academy) and took home nine (including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Design, Best Editing, and Best Music). It was also the Czech Republic's candidate for this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

I haven't seen all the other films in contention for the 2013 Czech Lion awards, but I have seen all five of the films nominated for the 2013 BFLF Oscar (plus candidates from several other countries as well), and I can tell you with no hesitation that I think it was better than three of them and tied with one. (For the record, of the  five BFLF films  in contention in 2013, my own choice would have been War Witch. I also think No is quite good, but I am no fan of Amour.)  

So kudos to the Gene Siskel Film Center for bringing In the Shadow to Chicago so fast. As far as I know, it hasn't even played here in New York yet!

Note that the Siskel Center has planned two screenings (Sunday June 9 and Monday June 10), and director David Ondříček will be onsite for Q&A both nights. 

To order tickets, visit: www.SiskelFilmCenter.org.

"Thank you for listening."

In the opening moments of Robert Redford's wonderful new film The Company You Keep, a middle aged woman pulls into a rural New York gas station, where she is immediately encircled by police cars and arrested by the FBI. Although she looks like an ordinary suburban matron, it turns out that this seemingly respectable person is actually "Sharon Solarz," a member of the Weather Underground who has succeeded in living below the radar for almost 30 years.

Frazzled editor "Ray Fuller" (Stanley Tucci) assigns the story to "Ben Shepard" (Shia LaBeouf), an ambitious young reporter with minimal knowledge of the Sixties and no sympathy for Solarz whatsoever. But something in the first article Ben writes sparks Sharon's interest, and she asks to see him. Hoping she will reveal useful information during the interview, the FBI agrees. And that's how we come to see Susan Sarandon, pale and drawn under harsh lights in an ugly orange jumpsuit, deliver one of the greatest performances of her distinguished career.

Calm and composed even while shackled to a table, Sharon speaks forcefully, and Ben finds the intensity of her commitment deeply moving. "Thank you for speaking with me," says Ben with genuine emotion when their time is up. "Thank you for listening," Sharon replies, and her presence resonates throughout the entire film, even though Ben never sees her again and neither do we.

Director Robert Redford has cast himself as attorney "Jim Grant" who is actually "Nick Sloan," another Weather Underground fugitive caught up in the mayhem unleashed by Sharon's arrest. The actual plot of The Company You Keep revolves around Ben's attempt to located Jim/Nick, as he goes on the run seeking aid and comfort from numerous compatriots all played in short sharp scenes by venerable Baby Boomers like Julie Christie, Richard Jenkins, and Nick Nolte. But what really follows is a two hour battle for the soul of Ben Shepard, who tracks Jim/Nick in good faith, as a reporter, without realizing that the FBI now has him under surveillance too.

Chicago, of course, occupies a special place in the mythology of the Sixties, beginning with the Democratic Convention in 1968 (and the subsequent trial of "The Chicago Seven"), and continuing right up through the 2008 Presidential campaign (when Barack Obama's relationship with his Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers, who was one of the founders of the Weather Underground, became a subject of intense interest on Fox News).

Redford is no fool, so I am sure he took this project on expecting negative blowback, nevertheless, The Company You Keep is a profoundly optimistic film. The film I saw was not about the past, it was about the future. Much like "you are what you eat," the phrase "the company you keep" is presented as a moral challenge, and by the end Ben Shepard has made his choice.

The Company You Keep opens in Metro Chicago today at the Landmark Century in Lincoln Park and the CineArts in Evanston.

 
Photo Credits: Doane Gregory/Sony Pictures Classics

ADDENDUM: FROM PAGE TO SCREEN

As is my way, I saw The Company You Keep at a preview screening, then I read the novel, then I saw the film a second time before writing this review. (I try to do this every time I want to write a serious review of a literary adaptation.)

Conventional Wisdom says "the movie is never as good as the book," but this is one case where CW is simply wrong. Neil Gordon's novel is OK (too many characters, too many coincidences, too much melodrama), but Robert Redford's film is very powerful. Working closely with screenwriter Lem Dobbs, Redford has extracted the best elements of Gordon's novel, and added some essential connective tissue. In Redford's hands, a story about the past becomes a catalyst for the future.

All of which is fine with me, except for one thing: where are the Jews?

Ironically, all of the names novelist Neil Gordon gave to his huge cast of characters (Jed Lewis, Mimi Lurie, Henry Osborne, Sharon Solarz, etc) have all stayed the same except for three: reporter Ben Shepard (known in the novel as Ben Schulberg), and the Sloan Brothers (known in the film as Nick Sloan and Daniel Sloan, but known in the novel as Jason Sinai and Daniel Sinai). So on the page, both of the protagonists-Ben Schulberg and Jim Grant/Jason Sinai-are clearly Jewish, but you would never know that if you had only met their onscreen counterparts.

And you know they are Jewish not only from their names, and from their face-to-face conversations, but also from their backstories, especially the Jim Grant/Jason Sinai backstory. In Gordon's novel, Jason Sinai is the son of a prominent Jewish labor lawyer, and when he goes on the run, the first place he heads is Lower Manhattan. He opens a hidden safe in his father's office, and finds not only cash (which he expects), but also updated IDs with photographs of his brother's aging face replacing his own (which he does not expect but clearly finds extremely useful). In other words, the Sinai family has neither seen nor heard from Jason for thirty years, but they have always prepared for a time when he might suddenly reach out to them in a crisis. And when that day finally comes, he has their full support.

Several years ago, when I interviewed screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (a good Jewish girl from New Jersey) about her adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, I asked her why the two main characters, Andy and Miranda, identified as Jewish in Lauren Weisberger's novel, were no longer Jewish onscreen. She said: "We were trying to streamline the book and we had a lot of stuff to deal with, with both Andy and Miranda, and it didn't seem like that was a part of it."

I can accept that explanation for The Devil Wears Prada, but I don't think it's appropriate in the case of The Company You Keep. Most of the leaders of the Weather Underground and its parent organization SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) were Jewish. So I agree with activist Mark Rudd when he says: "I do believe that the revolt of Jewish youth in the New Left of the sixties and seventies deserves to be studied and honored as an important chapter in the history of American Jews."

According to Rudd: "…two-thirds of the white Freedom Riders who traveled to Mississippi were Jewish; a majority of the steering committee of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement were Jewish; the SDS chapters at Columbia and the University of Michigan were more than half Jewish; at Kent State in Ohio, where only 5 percent of the student body was Jewish, three of the four students shot by the National Guard in May, 1970 were Jewish… This was only twenty years after the end of World War II, and World War II and the Holocaust were our fixed reference points. We often talked about the moral imperative to not be Good Germans."

Please note that this is definitely an asymmetrical relationship: most Jewish students were not radical activists; nevertheless, most radical activists were Jewish. If that fact is an indisputable part of the history of the Sixties, why leave it out?

Maybe transforming himself from someone named "Jason Sinai" into someone named "Nick Sloan" is OK for Redford. After all, when we see him on screen, many of us will always see him in our mind's eye as "Hubbell Gardner" in The Way We Were. But I wish Redford had kept the name "Ben Schulberg" for his foil instead of making him "Ben Shepard." Shia LaBeouf is one of the most promising young Jewish actors on today's scene, so all of this is part of the "baggage" that the real Shia LaBeouf now carries with him. My hope is that he has more chances to explore this legacy-on our behalf-in the future.

"Thank you for listening."

Here is a new definition of chutzpah: Dying on the day that a documentary film based on your life is scheduled for release in your own home town!

But it gets even better. In 2008, Ed Koch, the third of New York City's four Jewish mayors (to date), purchased a burial plot in Manhattan's Trinity Cemetery, and then he designed his own headstone to include these words: 

"My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish."

Daniel Pearl, 2002, just before he was beheaded by a Muslim Terrorist. 

He had these words carved right above the Sh'ma. And then, on February 1, 2013, exactly eleven years after Daniel Pearl's brutal murder in Pakistan on February 1, 2002, Ed Koch died in a Manhattan hospital at the age of 88. Oh yes, this man really knew how to put on a show!

 Koch is a marvelous documentary: well-researched and informative, yet playful and irreverent. Director Neil Barsky, making his filmmaking debut, worked as a reporter for years (first at the New York Daily News and then at Wall Street Journal) before moving over to Wall Street (first as an analyst and then as a hedge fund manager). So Barsky knows my own favorite maxim in his bones: "Follow the money."

Following the money leads Barsky to credit Koch with transforming Times Square from a dingy peephole paradise into a blazing commercial district lit anew each night by some of the brightest lights on the planet. But Koch didn't just dispense dollars downtown, he also funneled profits from the booming financial district back into all five boroughs.

Using news footage and a huge inventory of still photographs (beautifully assembled by editor Juliet Weber), Barsky shows exactly what the New York Times describes in its very long obituary : "Koch began one of the city's most ambitious housing programs, which continued after he left office and eventually built or rehabilitated more than 200,000 housing units, revitalizing once-forlorn neighborhoods."

As we watch President Obama and members of the 113th Congress debate public sector investment and the role of "Big Government," this is all quite timely. Ed Koch was clearly a man committed to using his power as mayor to improve the lives of real people from every walk of life "east side, west side, all around the town." Unfortunately, however, Koch is so focused on what happened within the five boroughs that a non-New Yorker is left feeling Barsky has only told part of a much larger story.

Start here: Where did all the money come from? Barsky provides hints, but then he never fully explores them. Elected to Congress in 1969, Ed Koch spent almost a decade in Washington, DC as a member of the House of Representatives. He didn't resign until the very end of 1977 (just in time to begin his first term as mayor). Quoting from the New York Times obituary again, during his time in Congress, Koch "became known as a hard-working, independent liberal able to work with conservatives. He co-sponsored a law that gave citizens access to their government files and introduced legislation for a national commission on drug abuse. He supported public transportation and housing, Social Security and tax reform, home health care for the elderly, aid to Israel, amnesty for draft resisters, solar energy research, federal financing of abortions and consumer protection measures." My guess is that many of his DC colleagues were still on hand to approve the huge loan guarantees authorized by Congress once New York City's new mayor was in office.

Barsky also tiptoes around Ed Koch's relationship with the African-American community. Much is made in the film itself of Koch's decision to close the Sydenham Hospital in Harlem during his first-term, but I think there's more to it than that. Although Barsky mentions that Koch went down to Mississippi during "Freedom Summer" in 1964, he doesn't tell us how that might have affected Koch later, especially when Jesse Jackson included support for a Palestinian state as one of his platform points when he ran for President in 1984.

Let me be blunt here: When Jackson made his  infamous "Hymietown" comment, exactly who did he have in mind? ("That's all Hymie wants to talk about, is Israel; every time you go to Hymietown, that's all they want to talk about.") Reading  what Koch wrote  about his trip to Mississippi for the Village Voice in 1964, it's easy to imagine that he took Jackson's 1984 remark quite personally and reacted accordingly, not only in 1984 but when Jackson ran a second time in 1988.

My point is that New Yorkers like Barsky may well define Ed Koch as a New Yorker, but the quote from Daniel Pearl on his headstone indicates to me that Ed Koch wanted to be remembered as more than just a three-term mayor of New York City. My guess is that the man himself wanted to be known as someone who played not just on our national stage, but also on the world stage as well.

Koch opens this Friday (March 15) at the Music Box Theatre in Andersonville, and I definitely think you should see it, not because it's a perfect film, but because Ed Koch, in his all-too-human complexity, lived an exemplary Jewish-American life. Click here for times and tickets.

Note that one of Ed Koch's final gigs was hosting the web series "Mayor at the Movies." You can still watch him doing his reviews online, but right now, I'm taking the liberty of rating this film for him:

PS: Four Jewish mayors of New York? Yes. The first was Fiorello La Guardia, mayor of New York from 1934 to 1945. Although he was raised as an Episcopalian, La Guardia's mother was a Jew from Hungary and he spoke Yiddish on the campaign trail. The second was Abraham Beame who served as mayor from 1974 to 1977 (when he was defeated by Ed Koch). Michael Bloomberg, the current incumbent, was elected in 2001 and is in the final year of his third term.

After an extraordinary run of Oscar nominations for narrative features in the Best Foreign Language Film category (Beaufort in 2008, Waltz with Bashir in 2009, Ajami in 2010, and Footnote in 2012), this year two of the five Best Documentary slots are filled by films from Israel. The Gatekeepers and 5 Broken Cameras couldn't be more different, but taken together they are a tribute to the vitality of Israeli democracy, still vibrant despite all the obstacles.

The Gatekeepers are the six men who have lead Israel's Secret Service (the Shin Bet) in the era of Occupation: Avraham Shalom (1980-1986), Yaakov Peri (1988-1995), Carmi Gillon (1994-1996), Ami Ayalon (1996-2000), and Avi Dichter (2000-2005).

Composite of The Gatekeepers. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Filmmaker Dror Moreh had the audacity to ask them to appear in extended on camera interviews, and to their credit, they all said yes. Aided by Oron Adar, his extraordinary editor, Moreh weaves their stories together into a seamless whole that is both fascinating and heart-breaking. If you are seeking easy answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you will find none here. There is no black and white in The Gatekeepers, just lots of gray in every possible gradation. These are men of action, war heroes and highly decorated veterans, and yet, speaking to Moreh's camera, they are all thoughtful and reflective, as if, independently, they have also been seeking an answer to the exact question he is asking: how did all our lofty dreams of statehood come to this?

The oldest of them, Avraham Shalom, looks like a kindly zayde but he has been in the battle from the beginning. He fought with the Palmach and was a member of the team that brought Adolf Eichmann to justice. But in The Gatekeepers, describing how the field of operations changed after the great "6 Day War" victory of 1967, Shalom takes on the voice of someone telling bedtime stories to children. The rabbits went underground, he says; the dogs run around sniffing the air and tripping over each other trying to find them, but the rabbits have disappeared.

Members of the Shin Bet study Arabic; they learn to "read between the lines;" they visit towns and villages and try to build bridges. After decades of strife, a moment of hope… and then catastrophe. "He changed history," says Carmi Gillon, with a despair that knows no bottom. Who is Gillon talking about? By this point we have seen dozens of famous and infamous people on screen, but it turns out that Gillon is referring to someone whose face is almost never seen and whose name is barely known here in America.

For Gillon, the man who "changed history" was Yigal Amir, the twenty-five year old student from Bar-Ilan University who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. And now, almost two decades later, Moreh's clear implication is that Israel has yet to recover from this grievous injury to the body politic. It is not what they (the Palestinians and the Arabs) have done to us (to Israel and to the Jewish people) that causes Moreh the most pain; it is what we have done to ourselves.

The Gatekeepers is dry, analytical, and scrupulously balanced (some might even say "balanced" to a fault); 5 Broken Cameras, on the other hand, shamelessly bypasses the brain and takes aim directly at the heart.

Gibreel at 5. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber.

5 Broken Cameras presents itself as the straightforward story of an ordinary Palestinian man named Emad Burnat, who provides continuous first-person narration. Burnat and his wife Soraya have four sons: Mohammad (born in 1995), Yasin (born in 1998), Taki-Ydin (born in 2000), and Gibreel (born in 2005). "Each boy is a phase of our lives. Each boy experiences a different childhood."

The film is structured around birthday parties for Gibreel, from age one to age five. Burnat tells us that it is Gibreel's birth (in February '05) which prompts him to acquire the first of his many cameras, and every year, Burnat dutifully records Gibreel blowing out a new set of candles. But in counterpoint to that happy moment, Burnat also records life in the village of Bil'in: bulldozers arrive to clear the surrounding hills; construction workers build new apartment towers for the expanding population of Modi'in Illit; Israeli soldiers multiply to enforce the separation barrier in between. ("The first day the bulldozers come is very hard for me…")

Every Friday afternoon after prayers the men of Bil'in march, protesting their ever-deteriorating circumstances. And Israeli peace activists march with them, and soon supporters also flock to Bil'in from all around the world. ("They bring creative ideas to our protest.") Burnat's first camera, the one he said he got for personal use, is destroyed by an exploding tear gas canister. ("In order to keep filming, my friend Yisrael gives me a camera.")

"Now that Gibreel is old enough to understand, he comes to see the demonstration," says Burnat in his relentless narration. "Old enough to understand what?" I ask myself, and I realize I am already beginning to grow skeptical. Back home again, Burnat films Soraya washing Gibreel in the tub. "I wasn't afraid," says the toddler. "If there is gas, just smell the onion," responds the mother with pride. "You are a hero." Commenting on this intimate scene, Burnat worries about burns. "I hope he will develop a thick skin fast," says Burnat in his voiceover.

The skeptical voice in my head is now very loud: "What father takes a toddler to a potentially violent protest march?" Inevitably someone eventually dies in a melee, and Gibreel is there watching. "Daddy," he says once they are back home, "why don't you kill the soldiers with a knife?" "We all lose our childhood at some point," intones Burnat in his somber voiceover.

After 90 minutes, the credits finally roll and I'm aghast. We can debate the wisdom of the settlements (as "the Gatekeepers" clearly do) and we can certainly have empathy for ordinary Palestinians who just want to live their lives in peace. But what I just saw was a film about parents deliberately transforming their newborn son into a vengeful Jihadist. Can this propaganda really be a candidate for an Oscar in the Best Documentary category?

Worse yet, it takes mere minutes to learn that the whole thing is a fake. "I have no job or fixed income. Like the rest of the villagers, I live off the land," says Burnat in his voiceover. Yes there are one or two shots of his elderly father sprinkling some seeds around by hand, but we never see Burnat do any actual farming. One fall day, Burnat takes Soraya and the boys out to "harvest olives," but it looks like an excursion. Is this what pays for their home, where Soraya cooks meals for her family in a kitchen that looks much like my own?

I read interviews with Burnat in which I learn that his footage has been shown on television, on Al Jazeera and elsewhere. In the online press kit, Burnat is described as a "Palestinian farmer," but the bio goes on to include "freelance cameraman and photographer." Cameras 2 through 6 were all provided by Israeli peace activists, and the film's voiceover narration was written for Burnat by his Israeli co-director Guy Davidi (someone who never actually appears in the film itself).

Furthermore, a little more Googling reveals that the weekly Bil'in protests began in January 2005 (in other words, before Gibreel was born). According to Cambridge University historian Neil Rogachevsky, Bil'in is best described as a suburb of Ramallah, and many of the people in the village actually work for the Palestinian Authority. In an article published in 2010, Rogachevsky goes on to say: "Ramallah pays to keep the Bil'in protest movement alive." No one watching 5 Broken Cameras would ever guess there was any connection.

I visit IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) and watch a documentary short by Guy Davidi called Women Defying Barriers in which four women meet after the invasion of Gaza. The two Jewish women express their personal guilt over the suffering of Palestinian children in Gaza while the two Palestinian women sneer. In Davidi's world, the Palestinian women have no guilt because they have nothing to feel guilty about. Apparently no one has told him that missiles from Gaza rain down on Israeli children too.

I've seen all of this year's Oscar-nominated docs (in addition to The Gatekeepers and 5 Broken Cameras, the list includes How to Survive a Plague, The Invisible War, and Searching for Sugar Man), and I sincerely believe The Gatekeepers is the most serious, timely, and thought-provoking of these five films. But were I forced to bet, I would place my money on 5 Broken Cameras. If that happens, if the doc that takes home this year's Oscar is 5 Broken Cameras, it will be a very sad night for me.

The Gatekeepers opens locally on February 22 at the Landmark Century in Lincoln Park, the Landmark Renaissance in Highland Park, and the CineArts in Evanston. Click here for the complete release schedule. 5 Broken Cameras is already available on DVD from Netflix and can be streamed on Amazon.

  
Melanie Laurent as Annette Monod.

July 16, 1942: Early in the morning, French gendarmes start banging on the doors of thousands of Jewish Parisians, and order them to pack one suitcase of personal effects each plus enough food for two days. They are then loaded onto trucks and herded into the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a sports stadium near the Eiffel Tower known colloquially as the "Vél d'Hiv."

After enduring several days of stifling heat, with poor sanitation and limited fresh water, they are packed off to small regional internment camps outside Paris, and soon after, they are sent on to Auschwitz, where almost all of them are immediately gassed upon arrival.

This black day in history is now known in French as "La Rafle" (in English, "The Vél d'Hiv Round Up"), and if some of this already sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you either read Tatiana de Rosnay's best-selling novel Sarah's Key (published in 2007), or saw the film adaptation released in 2011 (staring Kristin Scott Thomas as an American journalist named "Julia" who is covering French plans to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of the Vél d'Hiv Round Up), or both.

Regular readers might recall that I was none too fond of Sarah's Key. In my August 2011 JUF News column, I wrote: "Without giving away the ending, let me just say that while the scenes set in 1942 are urgent and compelling, I couldn't find the adult Sarah in the girl so poignantly played by young Melusine Mayance… These documented historical facts, still so raw and painful, deserve a better framing story."

After I saw the film, I read the novel (that's the rule I follow as a film critic), and I did like the novel more, but only a little. For one thing, the melodramatic scene in which Sarah commits suicide was definitely added by director Gilles Paquet-Brenner and his co-screenwriter Serge Joncour; the fate of the novel's adult Sarah is much more ambiguous. But still, comparing Sarah's ordeal with Julia's domestic travails (which run along parallel lines in both the novel and the film), made me queasy.

So from my POV, it is all to the good that writer/director Rose Bosch keeps La Rafle anchored in the horrific events of 1942, and feels no need to "engage our sympathies" further by adding a contemporary heroine.

The narrative arc of La Rafle follows two characters, both drawn from life. The first is "Joseph Weissman;" the second is "Annette Monoud." Joseph, nicknamed "Jo," is the child of Jews from Poland. Annette Monoud is a French nurse and the daughter of a Protestant minister. We follow them separately for the first third of La Rafle, then their stories forever entwine when they meet in the Vél d'Hiv in the middle of the film.

When we first see him onscreen, Jo (played by Hugo Leverdez) is a happy kid living in a working class neighborhood with his parents and two older sisters. His father "Shmuel" (Gad Elmaleh) is a laborer with left-wing political views. His mother "Sura" (Raphäelle Agogué), who takes in ironing to help the family finances, is more religious. These are hard-working people who treasure their lives in France.

Sura, who sprinkles her clumsy French with Yiddish, has especially bitter memories of life in Lublin. Her consolation is that her children were all born in France, so whatever might happen to her, they are French citizens and therefore they are safe. As the round-up begins, Shmuel even asserts himself with the gendarmes, demanding respect as someone who fought for France in World War I. It doesn't matter. From the perspective of the Vichy Government, they are all just Jews… full stop.

The real Annette Monod came from a prominent French family. Film geeks will love the fact that one of her distant cousins is French director Jean-Luc Godard. Humanitarians will appreciate her close genealogical connection to Jean-Paul Sartre's mother Marie Louise Schweitzer (related on her father's side to Nobel Prize-winner Albert Schweitzer). None of this deep background (Thank you, Google!) is presented in the film, of course, but the Annette we meet onscreen does seem to possess a rare inner fortitude, as well as the firm conviction that she has the right, as a French citizen, to protest the horrendous treatment of her Jewish countrymen at the highest levels.

This appears to have been the real woman (someone who fought for years against the death penalty and ended her days working for Amnesty International); "Annette Monod" isn't just a screenwriter's convenience. (Note that the press kit claims "Today she is one of The Righteous Among The Nations...honored by Israel," but I was not able to verify this on the Yad Vashem website.)

French actress Melanie Laurent (best-known to American audiences for the Jewish characters she has played in Beginners, Inglorious Basterds, and Le Concert) is luminous as the moral center of La Rafle. True, I would have excised her close-ups with young Nono's teddy bear, but that is a really tiny quibble. For the most part, filmmaker Rose Bosch keeps our eyes focused on the abyss without clouding them with tears. Brava!

La Rafle opens tomorrow (January 18) at the Gene Siskel Film Center on State Street. For additional dates, times, and tickets, visit their website.

To learn more about La Rafle's historical background, visit the Menemsha Films website.

  

 Inside the Vel d'Hiv. Photos courtesy of Menemsha Films. 

Welcome to New Jersey! When "Andy Brewster" (Seth Rogen) arrives at Newark Airport, his mother "Joyce" (Barbra Streisand) is there to greet him. But although Joyce wears a mile-wide smile, every inch of her tremulous body signals that visits from Andy are few and far between. And thus begins a lovely new film from Anne Fletcher in which two people in one of mankind's most intense dyadic relationships learn to treasure each other anew as separate and unique individuals.

There are good reasons why the "road trip" is such a popular movie genre. As the principals travel from Point A to Point B, filmmakers behind the scenes have a constant supply of raw energy at the ready (new scenery, zany characters, clever plot twists). In the right hands, each stop along the way becomes another jewel in a bracelet audiences can close at the end with a satisfying click of the clasp: "The circle of life."  

In The Guilt Trip, Andy invites Joyce to join him on a cross-country drive so he can pitch to potential distributors like Kmart, Costco, and the Home Shopping Network before returning home to LA. Andy is an organic chemist who has invented a good product (a biodegradable, child-safe and eco-friendly cleaning solution), but he's not much of a salesman. Faced with the prospect of all those strange faces, he suddenly wants his Mommy.

I don't think we ever know exactly where they start from (although there is one scene explicitly set in Montclair), but suffice it to say that while Joyce lives in a comfortable suburban home, she will never meet up with Carmela Soprano in the neighborhood grocery store. Joyce, who has been a widow for decades, lives a quiet life with her friends and her books and her television shows. She spends her time waiting for calls from Andy, who never really needs to call her because she's always calling him. So Joyce is stunned when Andy asks her to come along, but she's immediately on board.

I won't reveal any of the details of their various stops in Tennessee, Texas, Nevada, and California except to say they're tender and endearing, engineered to allow both characters to know more about themselves as well as each other by the time they finally part at the San Francisco airport. Yes, there is a well-earned happy ending prompting both smiles and sniffles.

Rogen is best known for his roles in raunchy Judd Apatow films like Knocked Up and Funny People, but now that he's famous he's also taken roles in small Indies like this year's heart-wrenching Take This Waltz, in which he plays Michelle Williams' Jewish husband "Lou." Is Andy Brewster Jewish? It's hard to imagine Barbra Streisand playing anyone who isn't Jewish, but except for one murmured Yiddish endearment ("tateleh"), the Brewsters, while implicitly Jewish, are never explicitly so. Let's just say it's a given.

Streisand, playing her first lead role in decades, is a joy to watch on screen. (She had funny bits as Ben Stiller's mom "Roz Focker" in Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, but her last starring role was "Rose Morgan" in The Mirror Has Two Faces way back in 1996!) This character, "Joyce Brewster," couldn't be more different from the real Barbra Streisand, and yet she's genuine and totally believable (enough so that her intrusive kvetching is sometimes as irritating to the audience as it is to Andy). Her subtle delivery in the penultimate scene, set high on a hilltop in one of San Francisco's "Painted Ladies," is a lovely little grace note.

Screenwriter Dan Fogelman is definitely Jewish and according to the buzz, he based this story on a real road trip he once took with his own mother (now deceased). If so, this may explain the film's main flaw which is that we don't really know enough about Joyce's backstory. But director Anne Fletcher compensates for this by making Joyce totally vivid in each moment on screen, and so, in the end, I really didn't care much about what she'd really been doing all those years before getting into her car to drive to Newark Airport.

Fletcher began her career as a dancer and made her movie breakthrough as a choreographer in films like Hairspray, but now she's turned to directing, and she's already created two films that have been critical bombs but commercial successes. Like The Guilt Trip, Fletcher's earlier films 27 Dresses and The Proposal are more complex and therefore more rewarding than they appear to be. Dismissed as "RomComs" (Romantic Comedies), both 27 Dresses and The Proposal were really about characters approaching 30 who can't quite grow up until they recognize their parents as people (flaws and all). Clearly The Guilt Trip is a natural addition to this body of work.

I expect The Guilt Trip to get a lot of negative reviews, but don't let that stop you. It's sweet and life-affirming and in this season of hype and bluster, you can do a whole lot worse at your local multiplex.

  
Photo Credit: Sam Emerson/Paramount Pictures Corporation